If any elephants survive in Africa today, it's thanks to this man

Telegraph

08-05-2025

On a freezing night last November, anyone walking down Exhibition Road in London's South Kensington would have seen a seemingly endless queue of people waiting patiently outside the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) while doing their best to ignore the extreme cold.
They had come to pay homage to Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the great elephant conservationist, and to watch the UK premiere of A Life Among Elephants, a documentary about him, which will be shown on Channel 4 (Saturday 10 May, 4.25pm).
Seven hundred of them packed into the fine old wood-panelled auditorium of the RGS, and at the end they rose in sustained applause for the man who has done more than anyone else over the past 60 years to save the African elephant from being destroyed by the cruelty and avarice of his fellow humans. Douglas-Hamilton's daughters, Saba and Dudu, were there to present the film, but sadly their father was absent.
During his long career, Douglas-Hamilton had faced all manner of mortal threats. He had survived full-frontal assaults by irate elephants, being trampled by a rhinoceros, assorted plane crashes and poachers ' bullets, not to mention some vicious attacks on his work and reputation by those enriching themselves through the global ivory trade. But he was finally caught out by the most improbable of hazards.
In February 2023, he and his wife, Oria, were enjoying an evening stroll around their farm on the shore of Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Rift Valley, when they were attacked by a swarm of African bees, which are much more aggressive than their European counterparts.
Douglas-Hamilton, then aged 80, did his best to protect Oria, who is 10 years his senior. But as he sought to shield her with his body, he was stung over and over again and went into anaphylactic shock.
It took eight hours to get him to Nairobi. There he spent three weeks in intensive care, slipping in and out of consciousness. 'He was fighting for his life. We very nearly lost him. But he's a tough old Scot and my God he's hard to kill,' Saba says affectionately. 'We genuinely thought he was not going to make it,' adds Dudu.
Douglas-Hamilton was finally discharged after six weeks in hospital, but his heart had been seriously weakened. He was able to return to his beloved Naivasha, where he could enjoy the buffalo, zebras and giraffes that roam around the farm, but after six decades his work with elephants was effectively over.
The very evening that A Life Among Elephants was being premiered 4,000 miles away in London, Oria organised a screening in their Naivasha home for her husband and 20 of their closest neighbours and long-serving employees. As at the RGS, it was a very emotional evening and everyone burst into applause at the end.
'He was deeply moved by it,' says Dudu. 'He's very self-deprecating. He's had many approaches during his life to make documentaries about him but he's always turned them down. This is the first time he's allowed it to happen, because he had a wonderful relationship with Nigel Pope [a wildlife filmmaker and the documentary's director].
'Over a 12-year period, Nigel's interviewed Iain many times, and he asked if he could continue interviewing him. That's how it evolved into a documentary. That's the only way he'd have accepted something focused on him.'
Douglas-Hamilton is a modest man with – to misquote Churchill – little to be modest about. His life has been a model of resourcefulness, courage and determination, often in the face of overwhelming adversity.
In the 1970s, he witnessed an Africa that he knew as a wildlife paradise transformed by poaching cartels into a giant charnel house for elephants. He spent 20 years leading a lonely battle to save them from what he called an 'elephant holocaust'. Against the odds, he won, but then had to fight that battle all over again in the late 2000s.
Born in Wiltshire in 1942, he was the grandson of the 13th Duke of Hamilton and the son of a celebrated Spitfire pilot who was killed during World War Two, shortly before his second birthday. In the documentary, Douglas-Hamilton's eyes fill with tears after flying the route over the Channel from France along which his father had nursed his crippled plane before it crashed. His mother, a 1930s pin-up who pioneered women's fitness programmes, subsequently married a South African surgeon.
Douglas-Hamilton loved the outdoor life in Cape Town – fishing, mountaineering, surfing. After boarding school at Gordonstoun, in Scotland, he studied zoology at Oriel College, Oxford, primarily so he could return to Africa. In 1966 he won a scholarship to study elephants in Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park, where the problem at that time was too many elephants, not too few.
The next four years were idyllic. He built himself a shelter near a waterfall in the bush, and while Dian Fossey studied gorillas in Rwanda, and Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees elsewhere in Tanzania, Douglas-Hamilton conducted a groundbreaking study into elephant social behaviour. He learnt to identify some 500 of them by sight, and gave them names. Virgo would come when he called and take fruit from his hand. Boadicea would stage mock charges but always pulled up short.
It was a 'golden age' for conservationists, he said, but the work could be dangerous. One huge female elephant flung him 10ft through the air, battered him from side to side with her feet, then inexplicably walked away instead of spearing him with her tusks. Another plunged her tusks into his ancient Land Rover, raised it 'like a demented forklift' and pushed it backwards 35ft into a tree, with him in it. He spent several weeks in hospital after being gored by a rhino. He took Charles Lindbergh, the pioneering aviator, into the bush and came face to face with a lion.
At a party in Nairobi during a rare return to civilisation, he met Oria Rocco, a photographer whose French and Italian parents had come to Africa in the 1920s and settled at Naivasha. By then he had learnt to fly, and a week later he landed – unannounced and barefoot – at her parents' farm and flew her back to Manyara to meet his elephants. It was the start of what Saba calls her parents' 'amazing lifelong love affair'. In 1970, Douglas-Hamilton had to make a frantic flight from Manyara to Nairobi, racing the setting sun, when Oria went into premature labour with Saba.
After two years writing his DPhil back in Oxford, Douglas-Hamilton returned to Manyara with his wife and two infant daughters. There they made a documentary, The Family That Lives with Elephants, and wrote a book, Among the Elephants, which became an international bestseller.
The film showed him with long hair and wearing shorts as he introduced his tiny girls to the vast elephants. Both now admit they were frequently terrified, but insist that their father knew exactly what he was doing.
'I like to think I was baptised in elephant breath,' says Saba. Dudu recalls how her father 'would train us to read elephant behaviour and understand when an elephant was irritated and properly charging or just doing a false charge. He would take us out on foot, very close to the elephants, and hold us by the collar and say, 'Don't move.' We would stay and watch and sometimes these elephants would stage false charges and we would have to hold our ground.'
'Those early days were just magic, really magic,' Oria recalls in Pope's documentary, but in the mid-1970s, the carnage began. Fuelled by soaring prices for ivory in Japan and the West, and encouraged by corruption, political instability and a proliferation of weapons across Africa, poachers began slaughtering elephants on an industrial scale. The tusks that were supposed to protect them became their death warrants.
'And so it was that our lives were taken over by the battle for the elephants,' Douglas-Hamilton wrote in a second book, Battle for the Elephants (1992), also co-authored with Oria. 'It was a battle which would be fought on the field and in conference rooms. We would join those involved in a never-ending battle for money to pay for run-down national parks and raggle-taggle anti-poaching forces. The battle would be fought from the skies and on the ground, shooting and getting shot at in bloody skirmishes with heavily armed poachers. It was to be a battle against corruption and maladministration at the highest levels; and above all it would prove to be a battle against the co-ordinated forces of a powerful and persuasive lobby orchestrated by the ivory trade.'
For three years from 1976, Douglas-Hamilton conducted a pan-African elephant census across 34 countries. He found that 'everywhere other than a few countries in southern Africa, the elephant herds were collapsing one after another'. He added: 'If you were referring to people you would call it genocide.'
But the conservation establishment failed to act. The ivory lobby claimed that elephants were being killed at a sustainable rate, and that regulated killing with the profits ploughed back into conservation was the way forward. It derided Douglas-Hamilton's work, accusing him of using sensationalism to obtain grants. For years the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wide Fund for Nature 'sat on their hands', he said.
'No one wanted to believe what he was saying, and there was a long period of time when he was an outcast,' says Saba. 'People were trying to destroy his reputation and destroy his credibility as a scientist. It was pretty bleak.'
Deeply frustrated, Douglas-Hamilton moved to Uganda in 1980 to do battle in person for that country's remaining elephants amid the violence and anarchy that followed President Idi Amin's misrule. He was appointed honorary chief park warden, and turned the bedraggled, demoralised rangers of three national parks – Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth and Kidepo Valley – into effective paramilitary forces.
They engaged in regular gun battles with the poachers while he provided air support. His Cessna was shot at and hit so often by the intruders, who included soldiers from neighbouring Sudan, that he had to have armour plating installed beneath his pilot's seat.
Having rescued Uganda's elephant populations, he returned to the political fray in 1982. He provided the hard data, Oria the emotional punch. As the 1980s progressed, the tide gradually began to turn. The sheer scale of the carnage became undeniable. Other conservationists started speaking out. The world's media embraced the story and exposed the futility of attempting to regulate the ivory trade.
In a hugely symbolic event, in July 1989 Daniel arap Moi, Kenya's then president, burnt a huge pyramid of poached elephant tusks, representing more than 2,000 elephants, worth £3 million. 'That was such a powerful moment,' says Saba. 'It told the world that we in Kenya don't believe ivory should be sold and that we would rather burn it first.'
Three months later, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) finally banned the international commercial ivory trade. The price of ivory collapsed and the orgy of poaching subsided. Douglas-Hamilton wrote of his 'profound relief that a ceasefire had at last been won for the elephants'. An elephant, he said, was no longer 'like a paper bag stuffed with money left lying in the bush'.
But by then Africa's elephant population had plunged from an estimated 1.3 million in 1979 to 600,000 in a single decade, and his beloved elephants in Lake Manyara National Park had not escaped the slaughter. Of the 500 he had come to know in the late 1960s, scarcely 180 remained.
He returned there with his family in 1990. Virgo had miraculously survived, and they spotted her crossing a track. Douglas-Hamilton jumped from the Land Rover. He slowly approached her, gently calling her name. She froze, turned her ears to listen as if remembering that voice from happier times, then turned and bolted. 'Maybe it's better she learns to fear mankind,' he said. 'We had tears pouring down our faces,' says Saba. 'It was heartbreaking.'
In the relative calm that followed the Cites ban, Douglas-Hamilton founded Save the Elephants with a research station in northern Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. There he trained a whole new generation of elephant conservationists and pioneered the use of GPS collars to track elephants and create safe corridors for them.
But the lull proved temporary. In 2007, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia persuaded Cites to permit a one-off sale of their ivory stockpiles to China. That triggered a huge new demand for ivory among China's rapidly swelling middle classes. Africa was swiftly engulfed by a second 'elephant pogrom' that lasted another decade.
Douglas-Hamilton rejoined the battle, but this time he was not alone. He testified, lobbied, wrote papers, gave interviews and raised funds to combat the illegal ivory trade. He worked with Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State. He also sought to influence Chinese public opinion, harnessing the power of celebrities including basketball star Yao Ming, who appeared in a WildAid campaign that showed him beside an elephant with the strapline: 'When the buying stops, the killing can too.'
In 2017, under intense international pressure, China's President Xi Jinping banned all commercial trade in ivory and the price collapsed again.
Douglas-Hamilton is now 82 and extremely frail – although, as Saba says, 'Considering how many scrapes he's had, it's extraordinary he's lived to the age he has.'
He returned to Samburu for Pope's documentary, and was manifestly delighted to see some of its elephants once more. 'It was a big moment,' says Dudu, but he will not visit again. Nor will he fly again, though, as Saba says, 'The air is his happy place. That was where his soul was set free.'
But his work lives on in the hundreds of thousands of African elephants that he has done so much to preserve, in the new generation of conservationists whom he has trained, and in his daughters, who have both inherited his deep love of those vast, lumbering creatures. Saba is a wildlife filmmaker and runs a camp for elephant lovers at Samburu. Dudu is the regional operations manager for African Parks in Ethiopia and South Sudan, and working on one of Africa's largest conservation projects, covering an area well over half the size of England, which includes the rehabilitation of three vast, contiguous and long-neglected national parks in those two countries.
'He took us wherever his work went, so we were able to experience at close hand conservation in action throughout our childhood,' she says. 'It was a very interesting childhood, going to extraordinary places and meeting all these amazing conservationists, so it was deeply inspiring and absolutely fed into what we're doing today.'
Douglas-Hamilton was too weak to be interviewed for this article, but Saba says he dislikes looking back in any case. Even in hospital, after the bee attack, he was looking forward. As he fought for his life, 'he was talking about the elephants, wanting to know about the elephants, always wanting to know what was happening to the elephants'. Dudu reckons it was the thought of his elephants that carried him through.
A Life Among Elephants is on Channel 4 at 4.25pm on Saturday 10 May, and available to stream afterwards